[Windows] Download TED videos with TED Downloader

Ever seen a TED video? If not, then you don’t know what you are missing. TED – which stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design – is a nonprofit organization that organizes TED conferences and talks where people, including famous personalities such as Al Gore and Steve Jobs, give speeches often on an idea they have or invention they have created but sometimes just plain inspiration. Although my description of it may sound geeky and boring, TED is a great nonprofit through which people share amazing ideas. And TED Downloader is a small, portable program that allows you to download these amazing ideas; to download TED videos.

TED Downloader is a very simple application. As already mentioned, it is portable so it need not be installed. All you have to do is

Download TED Downloader.

Run it.

Select the quality of videos you want.

Select the folder you want to place your downloads in.

Click the Update Links button to fetch all the TED videos currently available.

Select the videos you want to download.

Download TED videos.

It really is as simple as that.

In regards to downloading videos, you can either download directly from within TED Downloader by using the Get Ted Talks button or you can click on the Export the Links button to export (to a text file) direct links to the videos you have selected. You can then input those links into your favorite download manager – or visit them in your web browser – to download the videos.

TED Downloader is a fairly new app so it gets kudos for just working. However, as useful as it may be to download TED videos, there are still a few features it is lacking:

Update Links grabs all available TED videos. That means hundreds of videos. It would be better if TED Downloader allowed users to enter a date or pick specific TED conferences from where they want videos from. This would make finding specific videos a lot easier and would be more efficient than loading a list of all videos every time.

As it stands, users have to fetch the list of TED videos every time they run TED Downloader. Fetching the list doesn’t take very long at all but it would be a lot more convenient (and efficient) if the list was locally cached and only updated when updates are necessary (i.e. when new TED videos are available) or if the user manually runs an update.

Similar to the above, TED Downloader does not save any of your settings. In other words, every time you run TED Downloader the video quality will be set to Low by default and you will have to select a download folder. It would be a lot more useful if TED Downloader remembers the last used video quality setting and the last used download folder.

TED Downloader has no search capabilities. Sifting through hundreds of videos is not fun. Being able to search is an absolute must.

TED Downloader needs the ability to pause/resume video downloads, when using the internal downloader.

TED Downloader needs the ability to download TED videos with subtitles. (The developer states this will be available in the next version.)

TED Downloader allows users to select all videos by clicking the box next to Video Title but unchecking that same box does not unselect all videos. This is very annoying.

Some TED videos are not hosted on TED’s website but rather third-party sources like Youtube. It would be handy if TED Downloader could grab those, too.

You can grab TED Downloader from the links below:

Version reviewed: v2.3.0.2

Supported OS: Officially Windows XP and Win7, but presumably works on Vista too

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